8 Answers
8

I've never seen wallpaper adversely affect performance on the machine itself, but when connected to the machine from a remote desktop connection it certainly can. The bitmaps that get sent across in a terminal session are much smaller with just a solid color background.

I suppose with really low-grade video hardware or a buggy video driver you could see downgraded performance.

Rarely I've seen wallpaper be repainted slowly after a maximized window was minimized, but that's usually when there are a ton of things going on on the server that consume considerable amounts of system resources.

Also, I think using an image that is bigger than your screen resolution (so Windows will stretch it down, if that's what you select) might slow things down at points. That might only be when you load the wallpaper (login, desktop refresh, change, etc) and a bit of a RAM hit, though. My guess.
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NathanielJan 4 '10 at 20:27

"and I do mean earliest, somewhere about year 2000" Yeah, remember the 90s, before computers were invented?
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Electrons_AhoyJan 4 '10 at 20:20

I'm guessing "earliest" is talking about machines that would come with XP on them, as that came out after 2000.
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HermsJan 4 '10 at 22:18

2

Just to clarify, I ment cca. 2000 as "earliest" since he was inquiring about winxp, and by my memory, xp came roundabout that time (I may missed by a year or two; really, didn't bother checking). Of course, there were computers before that time and there were windows before that time. Please, do not take out of context.
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ldigasJan 4 '10 at 23:36

When redrawing the desktop, it will make a slight impact on performance. Redrawing a detailed bitmap usually takes longer than redrawing a solid color. The difference isn't as noticeable on newer hardware, though.

If you are using some kind of remote access (via network / internet), then turning off the background will increase the transmission speed of your desktop. From my experience, a background image effects the performance very little (unless your running a netbook with little memory or something). It will chew through a bit of memory however, a 32bit 1920x1080 image will consume a bit over 8MB of RAM (not much of an issue of you have 8GB, but might be an issue if you have 512MB or less)

It can certainly have an impact on a machine with virtual memory, in my experience. (That's the default and how most machines run, although for newer machines with multigigabyte RAM there is a good case for disabling it.)

The problem is that Windows likes to swap ‘unused’ memory out to the pagefile even when there's no real need, there being memory to spare. That's normally not a problem, except for if you're working in a full-screen application window, your background image isn't being rendered; its memory becomes unused and gets swapped out to disc. Then when you finish working and unmaximise the window, it suddenly becomes needed; several meg of rendered background then has to be dragged back off the disc and copied back onto the screen. On older, slower machines like laptops this was very noticeable.

This was the case for WinXP; it may have changed in Vista/7 since, due to the increased usage of video-card-accelerated rendering.

Yes it will. It uses certain resources (I am not sure how) If you have a good hardware you don't have to worry about it but if you need 100% of your performance and you are doing tasks that are slowing down your PC then turn off your wallpaper.